Reddit signs $60 million deal allowing Google to train AI models on its content

Social media platform Reddit and Google have expanded their partnership and signed a reported $60 million deal that allows the Alphabet-owned search engine giant's artificial intelligence models to train on Reddit content.

Over the last 18 years, Reddit has become one of the internet’s largest open archives of constantly-updated human-generated conversations and experiences.

Google said, "Reddit plays a unique role on the open internet as a large platform with an incredible breadth of authentic, human conversations and experiences, and we’re excited to partner to make it even easier for people to benefit from that useful information."

A new Cloud partnership with Google will enable Reddit to integrate new AI-powered capabilities using Vertex AI. Reddit intends to use Vertex AI to enhance search and other capabilities on the Reddit platform.

People increasingly use Google to search for content on Reddit to find product recommendations, travel advice and much more. The search giant said, "We know people find this information useful, so we’re developing ways to make it even easier to access across Google products. This partnership will facilitate more content-forward displays of Reddit information that will make our products more helpful for our users and make it easier to participate in Reddit communities and conversations."

To enable these and other experiences, Google now has access to Reddit’s Data API, which delivers real-time, structured, unique content from their large and dynamic platform.

"With the Reddit Data API, Google will now have efficient and structured access to fresher information, as well as enhanced signals that will help us better understand Reddit content and display, train on, and otherwise use it in the most accurate and relevant ways. This expanded partnership does not change Google's use of publicly available, crawlable content for indexing, training, or display in Google products."

Reddit shared in a statement, "By making Reddit content and communities easier to find, we’re able to uphold our belief in the open internet while better serving current users and reaching new audiences. All of this builds on our existing partnership with Google Cloud to integrate new AI-powered capabilities to improve Reddit and help achieve our mission of bringing community, belonging, and empowerment to everyone in the world."

It added that this expanded partnership does not change Reddit's Data API Terms or Developer Terms, which state content accessed through Reddit’s Data API cannot be used for commercial purposes without Reddit’s approval. API access remains free for non-commercial usage under its published threshold.

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